Re: Implementing ALSA compatibility in OSS

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:58:34 +0200 (EET),
Hannu Savolainen wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> 
> > The purpose of having alsa-lib is that things like sample format/rate
> > conversion, virtualization, software synths, replacement drivers like
> > Jack etc. can be done in user space.  We either do not want or cannot
> > do this in kernel space.
> But why does this need to be done in alsa-lib?

Because we can provide a uniform API with that.
Each app doesn't have to take care of the whole such stuff.


> > > Maybe alsa-lib could be implemented on top of the OSS driver API instead
> > > of having two redundant APIs in the kernel.
> >
> > AFAICS the ALSA API is a superset of the OSS API.
> Right. 1500+ library calls is really a superset of OSS API that has just
> 5 system calls and a handfull of ioctl calls.

The ALSA "kernel" API is also not too bigger than that.

As Clemens explained, most of lib calls are accesors to the opaque
struct fields (imagine C++).  (Don't discuss further about the sense
of this implementation here at this point.  You're too late on the
stage for the definition of 1.0 API :)


Takashi


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